I recently learned what it really means when people say space is constantly expanding. At first I thought it just meant more matter is getting created on the outer areas of the universe or something. But it’s moreso space in the spacial sense is expanding between everything, like a balloon being inflated. This opened up a realm of stuff I hadn’t thought about, with my brain struggling to comprehend how there is finite ‘space’ in that sense. Like how does existence itself have a limit to size? For distance as a concept to exist, the space between atoms has to be finite, and doesn’t break down infinitely. But my brain can’t comprehend this, similar to how it can’t comprehend there being nothing before the big bang. It obviously can’t be infinite because there’d be no existsnce as we know it, but how can it be finite and exist at all?
I guess the question is, how is there a limit to the space between atoms?
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At the current time, space is expanding on a large scale. Small scale structures and galaxies are still bound by gravity.
If the expansion rate increases, it could over power the other forces and possibly the strong nuclear force. Then atoms could fly apart.
At this time it isn’t strong enough on a small scale.
The big bang applies to the universe but it is defined with the observable universe. This leads to confusion when discussing a singularity and an infinite universe. The observable universe has a radius of 46 billion light years. Rolling back the clock the observable universe was much closer together, hot and dense. Around the size of a grape fruit. The rest of the outside/unkown/infinite universe was on top of it, in the same hot dense state. That state could have been infinte or it could possibly have an edge we can’t detect. Our math break downs with infinity. I don’t think the entire universe was collapsed on us, it was just in the hot/dense state but still infinte.
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